Kpow v90.1 is packed with new Connect and Data Inspect features, provides a refreshed UI, and introduces Kpow Community Edition (CE).
Kpow Community
Just quietly, we have soft-launched Kpow Community Edition (CE) - the new, free version of Kpow.
Start Kpow CE with no config and a wizard UI will guide you through setting up cluster, schema, and connect resources.
Kpow CE will integrate one Kafka Cluster, one Schema Registry, one Connect Cluster, with the UI supporting one user at a time.
Kpow CE contains all the normal Kpow features that engineers love, without any enterprise features (e.g. Auth, RBAC, etc).
Install as many instances as you need, in any environment you like. No sign-up of license required, just pull the docker container and go.
Get started with Kpow Community, or view the Kpow Feature Matrix to see how Community differs from normal Kpow.
Further information will be provided when we officially launch Kpow CE, next week.
Kpow UI Refresh
Kpow v90.1 introduces a complete UI overhaul - we think it looks pretty good!
Kafka Connect Improvements
Kpow v90.1 has a raft of new Kafka Connect improvements.
Improved Debezium Connector Integration
Kpow will now correctly infer topics for Debezium connectors, allowing us to show fuller data on sink and source data consumption and production.
Additional Data in Connect Tables
Kpow now shows last-activity measurements for connectors, along with data volume measurements.
Unreachable Connectors
Occasionally connectors appear in the list provided by your Connect installation, but when we query them individually they are unavailable - often this is related to underlying issues with our resources related to the connector, for example a MySQL sink where the MySQL DB is down.
Previously these connectors would simply not show in the Kpow UI, from v90.1 we highlight these connectors as 'Unreachable', provide the stacktrace that we receive with information about their failed state, and allow you to take actions like restarting the connector.
Create Connector Improvements
The new Kpow UI features a much improved UX for creating new connectors - this looks particularly impressive when integrating Confluent Managed Connect, as they have a lot of connectors to display!
Topic Truncate
The Topic and Topic Partition details tables now offer a 'Truncate Topic' option in the action menu.
With this action you can truncate data in topics up to a particular offset, removing all records if desired.
Kpow offers the ability to truncate to specific offset, to truncate entirely, or to truncate to the current offset of a particular consumer group - meaning you can easily drop messages that are known to have been consumed.
Keep an eye out for next weeks feature blog-post on deleting, truncating, and tombstoning data with Kpow.
Data Tombstoning
Kpow v90.1 intrudoces the ability to explicitly tombstone Key and/or Value fields when producing data.
Simply don't select a serde for key or value and a nil field will be written. This has the impact of deleting data in compacted topics and ktables.
Keep an eye out for next weeks feature blog-post on deleting, truncating, and tombstoning data with Kpow.